While no character in the play can be called essentially Shavian, it is noteworthy that Keegan, the unfrocked parish priest, is the “ideal spectator”; in his mouth Shaw places his own poignant criticisms penetrating to the heart of the situation. At last the mystic in Shaw's temperament utters his noble message. And the true poet, vaguely shadowed forth in that essentially romantic figure Marchbanks, speaks from the heart of Bernard Shaw in the accents of Keegan, the mystic:
“In my dreams heaven is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshipper and the worshipper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three. It is, in short, the dream of a madman.”
Program of Candida.
The Princess Theatre, New York, Director: Arnold Daly. December 8th, 1903.
The first professional performance in the United States.
In Major Barbara, Shaw's next play, we discover a reversion to the earlier economic tone of Mrs. Warren's Profession combined with a more specific elaboration of the “Shavian dramaturgy.” This “Discussion in three acts” has aroused so much discussion as to its meaning and purpose that the story of its genesis may throw some light upon its obscurities. Mr. Shaw once related to me the circumstances under which the germ ideas of the play first took form in his mind. It seems that, while spending some time at his county place, Ayot St. Lawrence, in Hertfordshire, he formed an acquaintance with a young man who was a near neighbour, Mr. Charles McEvoy, the author of a play entitled David Ballard, produced under the auspices of the London Stage Society. At the close of the War between the States in America, Mr. McEvoy's father, who had fought on the side of the Confederacy, and was a most gentle and humane man, established a factory for the manufacture of torpedoes and various high-power explosives. The idea of this grey-haired gentleman, of peculiarly gentle nature and benignant appearance, manufacturing the most deadly instruments for the destruction of his fellow-creatures appealed to Shaw as the quintessence of ironic contrast. Here, of course, we have the germ idea of Andrew Undershaft. The contrast of the mild-mannered professor of Greek with the militant armourer occurred to Shaw as the result of his acquaintance with a well-known scholar, Professor Gilbert Murray, admirably kodaked by Shaw in the stage description: “Cusins is a spectacled student, slight, thin-haired and sweet voiced.... His sense of humour is intellectual and subtle, and is complicated by an appalling temper. The lifelong struggle of a benevolent temperament and a high conscience against impulses of inhuman ridicule and fierce impatience has set up a chronic strain which has visibly wrecked his constitution. He is a most implacable, determined, tenacious, intolerant person, who, by mere force of character, presents himself as—and actually is—considerate, gentle, explanatory, even mild and apologetic, capable possibly of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness.”
In 1902, when Mrs. Warren's Profession was produced in London, Shaw said in the Author's Apology affixed to the Stage Society edition of that play, “So well have the rescuers (of fallen and social outcasts) learnt that Mrs. Warren's defence of herself and indictment of society is the thing that most needs saying, that those who know me personally reproach me, not for writing this play, but for wasting my energies on 'pleasant plays' for the amusement of frivolous people, when I can build up such excellent stage sermons on their own work.” Major Barbara marks a return to Shaw's earlier preoccupation with economic themes and is a profound study of some of the greatest social and economic evils of the contemporary capitalistic régime. In conversation, Mr. Shaw gave me the reasons which led him to write this play.
“For a long time,” he said, “I had had the idea of the religious play in mind; and I always saw it as a conflict between the economic and religious views of life.
“You see, long ago, I wrote a novel called Cashel Byron's Profession, in which I showed the strange anomaly of a profession which has the poetry and romance of fighting about it reduced to a perfectly and wholly commercial basis. Here we see the pressure of economics upon the profession of prize-fighting.